This year's Zapad, or West, has been ongoing since Friday and will end on Tuesday.
Poland, which has responded by closing the border with Belarus, and the Baltic countries have been on high alert ahead of the exercise.
According to Putin – who was on site at a military facility in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, about 40 miles from Moscow – 100,000 people and 10,000 vehicles are involved.
Nuclear exercises
The Kremlin states, according to state-controlled Russian media, that soldiers from India, Iran, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mali are also participating.
Putin said that the goal is to practice "repelling possible aggression against the Union State", referring to the confederation between Russia and Belarus.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, on the other hand, sees the exercise as a simulation of a future occupation of the so-called Suwalki Corridor – a strip of land on the border between Poland and Lithuania where the distance is the shortest between the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus.
The military exercise has included conventional troops but also warships and bomber planes with nuclear capability. The maneuver has, according to the Belarusian army, practiced the use of nuclear weapons.
Warning from Rutte
It has also been practiced with modern hypersonic ballistic missiles, which can reach all of Europe, not just neighboring countries. Something that NATO chief Mark Rutte commented on with a warning:
Let us agree that in this alliance of 32 countries, we all live on the eastern flank.
When Zapad was held in 2021, just months before Russia's major invasion of Ukraine, 200,000 soldiers participated.
